News

Six members of the group (Bekah, Cory, Lavina, Rachel, Mackenzie, and Katie) head off to Florida this January to attend the 43rd International Conference and Exposition on Advanced Ceramics and Composites in Daytona Beach and the 43rd Annual USACA Conference on Composites, Materials, and Structures in Cocoa Beach. They will make eight presentations describing their latest research on CMCs, EBCs, and UHTCs. Enjoy sunny Florida!

Lavina starts a 10 week planetary science internship at JPL focusing on ice morphology on Europa. Congratulations on this exciting opportunity.

Katie Detwiler is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious SMART Scholarship, a Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to develop and retain talented, innovative, and brilliant scientists, engineers, and researchers. Congratulations Katie!

Bekah recently defended her PhD dissertation entitled "Mitigation Strategies for Calcium Magnesium Alumino-Silicate Attack on Environmental Barrier Coatings." Congratulations on a job well done!

Lavina recently won the best poster award at the Gordon Research Seminar on High Temperature Corrosion held at Colby Sawyer College, July 20-21. Her winning poster was entitled "Selective Oxidation in a High Entropy Carbide Ultra-High Temperature Ceramic." Nice work!

Warmest welcome to our new graduate student group members: Clark Luckhardt, Cameron Miller, Eric Stone, and Coleman Tolliver. We look forward to collaborating with you.

Check out , “Stability of the Y2O3-SiO2 System in High-Temperature, High-Velocity Water Vapor,” by Parker and Opila, published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society! https://doi.org/10.1111/jace.16915

Replacement of the melt-infiltrated (MI) silicon with a rare-earth silicide offers the potential to address both limitations of SMI CMCs. This study focuses on the ability of yttrium silicides to form yttrium silicates (phases with greater stability in high-temperature water vapor than SiO2) in high-temperature oxidizing environments. Read More...

Congratulations to Kendall! Her research on tantalum oxide stability in high-temperature steam is now published in The Spectra, UVA's Undergraduate Engineering and Science Research Journal. Read article here.

Bekah, Beth and KJ recently participated in Dechema's EFC-Workshop 2018: High Temperature Corrosion under Complex Conditions, Deposits and Salts: Towards Greener Energy in Frankfurt, Germany. Bekah and Beth presented research on CMAS resistance in EBCs, and KJ presented his work on Type II hot corrosion of aluminized MCrAlY coating.